Are Squibs Muggles by prolonged exposure to magic?
by Hapcelion
Summary: continuing forth, I'm going to talk about squibs and them being muggles... kind of. There's this whole thing about development and stuff, so don't read if you don't like bio.


Are Squibs Muggles with habituated exposure to Magic?

Once again, I continue to hypothesize a few things within the Harry Potter Universe. While my past two works focused on genetics and molecular biology in relation to magic and magic resistance, this article will tend to the subject of differentiating Muggles and Squibs, seeing as how they seem to be the same thing with different cultural/environmental exposure.

My previous work with the Magic Gene hypothesizes that both Muggles and Squibs carry the _m_ allele, with their genotype being _mm_. Before I had done any research, I had originally thought that Squibs were people who couldn't do magic, but could still see and hear stuff from the magical world, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to interact at Hogwarts and would have been repelled by magical barriers. However, studying into the subject by looking at dialogue and interview with Mrs. Rowling herself has yielded other facts I was not privy to.

Take for example Mrs. Figg from the Fifth Book. While Mrs. Figg is a Squib, it has been noted by the author that she was not actually capable of seeing Dementors, even though she testified about it in court. She did, however, provide an accurate account of the emotional side effects of being near a Dementor and was thusly accepted for the trial.

It becomes apparent that Squibs need magical items and/or magical creatures to help them interact with the magical community and bypass certain countermeasures against Muggles. So, basically they are Muggles. But then again, it is stated that these items/beasts are there to "help" Squibs interact with the Magical World. This leaves us to wonder whether they can naturally interact at a subpar level or can't entirely.

Let us, then, explore the ways in which they can interact at subpar levels.

As a child developing in the womb, you or anyone else that you know will most certainly have been influenced by hormones that were floating about within your mother's belly. Now, these hormones do have a knack of advancing development in certain areas. Take, for instance, the case of cryptorchidism. Normal males will develop with testis that gradually relocate to the scortum. However, due to a mother's intake of a lot of meat (which may contain a crap load of hormones of various function), these kids do have testis, just somewhere else in their bodies. These testis have not descended and are not located in the scrotum.

To a similar extent, toxic chemicals that are ingested into a mother's body, such as alcohol or tobacco, are called teratogens. They can mess up a babies development and create a number of deformities, or in some cases, killing the baby while still in the womb.

Would it not be unfeasible to say that having Magic in the air and being all around people will have the same affect after a person is conceived? Perhaps, then, Magic is something a Squib is used to by the time he comes into this world.

That is to say nothing of the affects of magic once he is outside, however.

We know UV (Ultraviolet) radiation causes skin cancer. It's an environmental affect, with radiation from the sun creating a dimer out of two adjacent Thymine nucleotides in your DNA. That'd obviously mess a few things up. For one, transcription and/or DNA replication would be ground to a halt, had it not been for specific enzymes that fix the dimers. If no we were to have no repair enzymes, we'd be facing a lot more cases of skin cancer, among other oncological disasters.

Additionally, there was that story of a king who was afraid of being poisoned, so he took small doses of poison in order to become immune to it. Of course, his enemies attacked in force, and he tried to poison himself, which didn't work. He had to impale himself instead. But the same idea goes. Maybe Magic works in the same way. One can grow a sort of immunity to it, too. Or just a good resistance to it. That's kind of what vaccines are for, you know.

Magic, I can only assume, works in a more beneficial way towards Squibs. Perhaps the presence of magic makes them more attuned to the location of certain places, certain creatures, etc. Having parents who introduce them to the world of magic certainly doesn't hurt, as they'd be capable of understanding what's going on around them. Though they can't actually conduct magical acts or see things that are supposed to be blocked to Muggle eyes, I would say that the exposure to Magic has allowed them to experience things arcane, definitely providing an edge over their Muggle cousins in a perplexing case of murders, i.e. the murders at Riddle House.

Could it be possible for a Muggle Repelling Charm to work on a Squib? Perhaps, but it may just be that they have some enchanted pendent keeping them from the effects of the charm. Alternatively, if they were to be 'immunized' by lifetime exposure to Magic, then they'd have no problem whizzing past the charm's threshold and doing whatever.

I'd rather not stretch this too far and suggest it as being a form of Magic Resistance, but we know very little about the Magical World from the little pieces of information Mrs. Rowling has bestowed upon us. Mind you, my hypothesis isn't particularly concrete, but I just felt the need to post up something that might engage an audience into some serious thinking about the mechanics of this particular universe.

Of course, then again, since when does anyone take entertainment seriously besides those who act and those who sell the act?


End file.
